tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 26 20:25:36 1997
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Lost Klingon: ST6 & Uhura's Bluff
- From: Steven Boozer <[email protected]>
- Subject: Lost Klingon: ST6 & Uhura's Bluff
- Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 22:25:10 -0600 (CST)
In her autobiography _Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories_ (New
York: Putnam's, 1994), Nichelle Nichols has this to say about her
experience learning tlhIngan Hol (pp. 293-4):
"Before we began filming, a great deal of preparation went into writing
a speech for Uhura to deliver in Klingon. Of course, with her being a top
linguist, it should have been a snap, especially since the professional
linguist who developed a Klingon language wrote it and taped it for me to
learn phonetically. Ever since Star Trek IV, there had been a lot of
pressure to retain some humor wherever possible, so midway through, Uhura's
perfect, dramatic speech was scrapped. In its place is a scene where the
Enterprise is hailed and questioned by a Klingon vessel, leaving it up to
Uhura to convince them that the crew is Klingon and on a mission of mercy.
[Writer/director Nicholas] Meyer envisioned Uhura at her console,
surrounded by piles of musty old books, desperately paging to find the
correct words. At first I protested: Books in the twenty-third century? On
the Starship Enterprise? Maybe something on CD ROM, perhaps. Even
microfilm! But Meyer, who knew me well enough by then, replied wearily,
"Nichelle, just don't question me on *this*."
"I stopped myself, and stifled a chuckle. It was the last movie, after
all. Forget the fact, which Trekkers would not permit us to do anyway, that
Kirk had known enough Klingon in the third film to get himself beamed
aboard a bird of prey. Or that the Klingons had so thoroughly mastered
English that throughout our dinner, Christopher Plummer's General Chang
spouts Shakespeare (which he insists is best appreciated in the original
Klingon) at the drop of a gravity boot."
J.M. Dillard explained the need for books in her novelization by having
Valeris and her co-conspirators sabotage the Universal Translator and
erase all Klingon linguistic data from all the Enterprise's computers.It
also seems Meyer later changed the passing Klingon vessel to a stationary
Klingon border outpost after he filmed this scene on the Enterprise
bridge.
Does anyone know what may have happened to this "perfect, dramatic speech"?
At the time, it would have been our first example of extended Klingon
discourse rather than the bits of movie dialogue and example sentences
quoted in TKD. Can anyone suggest a way to extract this from Okrand's or
Paramount's archives?
Voragh